Brain Rot Without Borders

Both in terms of absolute numbers and as a proportion of the global population, more people know how to read today than at any other moment in history. And yet if we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately as a sensibility that approaches the world itself as a text that requires interpretation, it’s obvious we live in an unprecedented decline of what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy.” The manifestations of this catastrophe range from the rise of psychotic conspiracy theories to the return of state propaganda and the collapse of the public sphere. The crisis comes into view most clearly, however, in the sudden and precipitous decline of the cultural practice that first taught all of us how to read the great book of the world. There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

Consider, for instance, the distressing state of reading and writing in the United States. I disagree with Philip Roth’s 2009 dictum that the novel will soon become a “cultic” concern, not because I believe that literary fiction is enjoying some sort of heyday in the core of the American empire but rather because I’m convinced that literature has always been an esoteric practice in the United States. At the time of his death, Roth was more famous than almost any living American literary writer, but that’s just a convoluted way of saying that his influence on the wider culture was insignificant. Unlike Gabriel García Márquez, he never became the voice of the nation, or indeed of the language—not for lack of talent or dedication but because the United States reserves those roles for musicians such as Bob Dylan, the only Nobel laureate in literature so far to work primarily in an oral tradition. In the decade and a half that has elapsed since Roth prophesied the retreat of the American novel into the windowless temple of a marginal sect of schismatics, literature in the United States and the English-speaking world has deteriorated at a faster rate than our warming planet. As evidence, consider a selection from the fifty works of fiction that since 2020 have appeared in Publishers Weekly’s annual list of U.S. bestsellers: Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, Dog Man: Fetch-22, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, and Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder. That graphic novels meant to help children learn how to read make up such a large proportion of the U.S. publishing market might suggest that most American adults lose all interest in literature as soon as they’re done with basic alphabetization.

The state of anglophone literature is so dire that thinking about the decline of American letters at this point no longer induces despair, only irritation and boredom. In an effort to shake off that ennui and to escape the grip of U.S. cultural hegemony, if only briefly, The Baffler has commissioned seven writers who work in languages other than English for dispatches on the state of postliteracy in their motherlands and mother tongues.

These correspondents’ reports are refreshing in that they are entirely free of the commonplaces with which Americans tend to explain the decline of the written word—e.g., mistaking the symptom for the illness and blaming ChatGPT for students’ plummeting reading-comprehension skills, as if people hadn’t begun to forget how to read long before Faustian Markov-chain machines became the fetish object of an apocalyptic theology—and remind us that there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in American publishing offices, where people believe that reading literature in translation is evidence of worldly sophistication rather than the refuge of the monolingual.

But it’s my unfortunate duty to warn the reader that the essays of this dossier offer few reasons for hope. From South Korea to Sudan, China to Mexico, Morocco to the Philippines, literature seems to be in retreat. The worst part is that, while every unhappy literature is unhappy in its own way, the various dystopias that our correspondents describe seem to be converging into a single literary catastrophe. And though the causes for our common predicament that these writers offer vary wildly, it’s possible to discern a terrifying trend: the loss of deep literacy is not an organic development or an accident without an author but rather the intentional consequence of concrete actions undertaken by the unholy alliance of capital and the state, which has availed itself of technology to slowly erode our capacity to understand what we read—and therefore to imagine a more just future.

Depressing, I know. But as Gramsci taught us, despair turns us into reactionaries. It’d be naive to pretend that reading a novel or translating a poem can be a form of resistance. But who knows? Perhaps reinventing the old literary forms could help us reverse the current moment’s drive to stupidity. Better to be cultic than dumb.

—Nicolás Medina Mora

A friend of mine, a Swedish psychoanalyst, has lived in China for seven or eight years and speaks some Mandarin. During one of our conversations, I was recounting the writing of my novel Cocoon, when he suddenly asked how to write cocoon in Chinese. Grass (艹) above an insect (虫), to get 茧, I told him. He then attempted to use this Chinese character, which I’d carefully selected as the title of my book, to reveal what was going on in my subconscious. Because the grass radical occupies the dominant position in this character, it might represent my source material; perhaps I had become overreliant on the security it provided, and I lacked the confidence to leave its shelter, which is why I worked on this book for so long without ever seeming to complete it. The Chinese writing system, he went on to say, was something that foreign psychoanalysts wanting to practice in China were obliged to absorb and understand because these ancient pictograms have shaped the Chinese psyche. I told him this may no longer be the case. I write my novels on a computer, which means typing in pinyin, i.e., entering the romanized form of each character and then selecting the one I want from among its homonyms, which is nothing like writing it out one stroke at a time. As a result, for all that I gave a lot of thought to choosing 茧 as my book title, it felt unfamiliar when I described the word’s appearance to my friend. These days, most people in China don’t need to write Chinese unless they’re still in school or have a job that requires handwriting. Therefore, it’s completely normal to forget how to write certain characters. Chinese characters may have a strong symbolic function in that their appearance reflects what they mean, but this has increasingly little to do with people’s day-to-day lives. After I’d explained all this to my friend, he sighed in disappointment. “What a shame,” he said.

In fact, some younger writers who publish their fiction online can’t even be bothered to type—they simply use an app that transforms their spoken words into text. Authors who use this highly efficient form of “writing” have barely any contact with the written word and engage with Mandarin only at its most surface level. Their vocabulary and sentence structures are extremely simplified because these stories mostly get read on phone screens and are designed to be scrolled through quickly. Unfamiliar words or complicated sentences would create an unacceptable delay for the reader. One of these web novelists told me that complex rhetorical devices or intricate descriptions are the enemy of the reading experience. As soon as a reader gets stuck, they’ll abandon the piece. Writers of web fiction prefer to use clichés in their descriptions so readers don’t need to use their brains and can easily sketch in the barest scenario to keep the fictional world spinning.

Internet fiction is doing incredibly well in China, and its main function is to provide entertainment. In my experience, the average web novel is over 300,000 characters (roughly 230,000 English words) and is presented in serialized form with new installments daily. In other words, readers will decide if each day’s content is exciting enough for them to keep reading, and they tend not to care if the story contradicts itself or is full of plot holes, if it meanders from its narrative or has no through line in the first place. Readers begin leaving comments as soon as each installment drops, many of them second-guessing the story’s development. With such open-ended narratives, authors cede their authority and become more like service providers. In web fiction circles, people refer to readers dogpiling on works they don’t like as “beating up the chef.” The poor chefs are reduced to frantically trying to serve ever more picky diners. In recent years, online writers have been forced to make it clear in their headnotes whether a given chapter contains anything that might upset readers—just as chefs must notify diners about potential allergens in their food—otherwise they are liable to be besieged and heavily criticized. Such “allergens” might include the protagonist cheating on a partner, the female lead suffering excessive emotional torture, too many romantic scenes between supporting characters, and so on. After checking that the text is free of their dislikes, readers can safely enter a fictional world custom-designed for them. At this point in time, web fiction has branched into a plethora of intricate, finely delineated genres, ensuring that paying customers can read exactly what they enjoy, free from anything they might prefer not to encounter. This consumerist approach has largely shaped younger readers’ tastes, which makes it hard for them to be interested in literary fiction, where there are no content warnings, the characters’ emotions are unregulated, and narratives are as unpredictable as real life. If you were to point out that this is how the world actually is, they’d reply that no one needs this damned reality. If we had any breathing room in our actual existences, why would we need to escape into fiction? After encountering a work of serious fiction, many younger readers have responses along the lines of “Life is horrible enough, why should I read something that makes me feel bad?”

In recent years, younger readers have begun applying the moral strictures of web novels onto the wider literary world, leaving them unable to accept any moral failing from fictional characters, such as being unfaithful or having an affair with a married person. In fact, they’d prefer there to be no sex at all. This is very likely the result of a long-term regime of censorship, with readers now tacitly accepting and even preferring a more prudish writing style. Writing too directly about the erotic feels vulgar to them. Literary fiction—which continues to include frank depictions of sex—is regarded by them as low-class gutter writing. On one platform, a reader left a comment for one of China’s most influential literary journals complaining about an anthology they’d put out several years ago; of its nine stories, eight had to do with sex, and the ninth included kissing. This commentor had very naturally appointed themselves as a lifestyle inspector who, while reading, carefully noted the degree of intimacy between protagonists.

There is an even younger generation for whom reading is a thing of the past. They grew up scrolling short videos and are used to their cultural products being both literal-minded and fragmentary. Originality is of no concern to them. China is going through a trend of drama series shot vertically, to be watched on a phone, each episode no more than three minutes. The first few episodes are free, the rest behind a paywall. The production quality of these series is uniformly terrible, making use of melodramatic performances and sensationalism to get viewers so hooked that they have no choice but to hit the pay button. Because each installment is purchased individually, it must contain a climax and end on a huge cliff-hanger. There is no overall story arc, just an endless sequence of shocking twists and reversals. These narratives fundamentally have no respect for storytelling and alter the contract we have with stories. If the nineteenth century was narrated by God and the twentieth by the common man, who is narrating the twenty-first? A demon or a clown?

All of this feels tremendously demoralizing. The meaning and power of language is in the process of being flushed away. The position of fiction is plummeting irretrievably while other forms of storytelling are damaging or misusing the tools of narrative. As a Chinese writer, perhaps the only crumb of comfort is that many of the traditional mindsets associated with literature are disintegrating too. In over a thousand years of cultural tradition, China’s litterateurs have always borne the burden of politics: reading in order to govern, writing in order to gain advancement. We have a saying: “Morality is carried in words.” This means that the purpose of literature is to convey whatever values and ideas the emperor decides are important because literary standards are inevitably decided by the ruler. With the declining importance of literature, no one with political ambitions could possibly view writing as a way to get ahead. This might lead to more pure-minded writers because, apart from sheer passion for literature, there is no reason to enter the profession. With ever dwindling numbers of readers, literature is no longer an effective propaganda tool. And so, with literature liberated from the gaze of politics, it may well gain an unprecedented degree of freedom.

In my country, South Korea, literature must be easy, with no exceptions. A reader must grasp the meaning at once. Otherwise, the book won’t sell. It won’t be read. Poetry, too, must be simple. The reader should pick out the poet’s intention at a single glance or else the reader grows angry. Readers take themselves as the measure of all things, the standard of every interpretation. One literary journalist, who claims to have read books every day of his life, declared that any poem produced in Korea today that he cannot understand is not poetry at all. Contemporary poets, he says, write difficult verse on purpose, out of arrogance or to tease their audience. Thus, the excellence—or mediocrity—of every work is determined by its degree of difficulty. Sales figures obey the same logic. As if answering a surgeon’s request to rate pain from one to ten, readers decide that any score above a five turns the text from literature to a torture device. Korean readers prefer something in the one-to-three range.

Among those easy works, if the piece contains Korea’s historical traumas, it earns favorable points from the readers. The more nakedly a trauma is put on display—not just mentioned but staged in full view—the better, especially when a writer brandishes a “historical alibi” for said events, one that can quickly double as the reader’s own. If the reader feels as though they, too, have ticked the box of civic virtue, that’s the cherry on top. Meanwhile, even the so-called professional critics’ literacy continues to deteriorate. A highly authoritative male critic pronounced that the sentences in my collection Phantom Pain Wings were grotesque, accusing me of somehow implicitly flaunting my sexuality. According to him, every bird that takes flight in my poems is my orgasm. I think: the last generation in Korea capable of reading, writing, and truly savoring poetry is vanishing. And in times like this: What am I, a poet, doing now?

Recently, my country witnessed the impeachment of a president. I had fervently wished for the removal of that president, who had declared martial law; I even posted a video online, petition in hand, begging the justices of the Constitutional Court to impeach him. One of the biggest reasons I prayed for the president’s impeachment was the language used by those in power: sentences fit for enemies, used by soldiers at war or by low-grade thugs, sentences that betrayed their base desires. These were the words with which they meant to govern the people. Moreover, I had already experienced martial law when I was in my late twenties. The censorship of the press and publishing at that time laid bare the authorities’ poor literacy. They banned songs, halted film screenings, and slashed apart articles and poems, not so much because of political disagreement but because they simply couldn’t understand them. Whatever lay beyond their comprehension was prohibited for the pettiest reasons. When those who rule lack literacy, the damage to the populace is immense. Only shallow, one-dimensional, sentimental works survive. Imagine, then, a woman poet working as an editor in some provincial outpost, hauling newly printed books to the censors’ office. How wretched that must feel.

In the end, the verdict came down, the impeachment was announced, and soon after, a chorus of praise arose for the court’s written decision. People called it a masterpiece, despite its plain, ordinary vocabulary—chosen, they said, with the nation’s varying literacy levels in mind. It was resolute, beautiful, and flawlessly reasoned. Of course, I felt the same. Rumor had it the justices delayed the ruling because they spent so much time refining the language, making it accessible to citizens with limited reading skills. A fad then began: copying out the judgment by hand. One online bookstore even sold special notebooks for transcribing it. I often hear that some readers have copied out my entire poetry collection in longhand. They proudly display those notebooks on social media. Whenever I see them, I must say, my skin crawls. What have my poems become in their hands? Hand-copying to “improve literacy” is now a craze here. After a prize-winning novelist claimed that copying texts boosted both reading comprehension and penmanship, everyone rushed to do it. Meanwhile, new censors roam the streets. They do not physically destroy books; they let books wither like drought-stricken trees. These censors go by another name: commerce. Setting themselves as the standard, they wait for any sentence they cannot grasp to die on its own. To vanish. Perhaps, inside a community where everyone has become a censor, they dream of exercising a vulgar “knowledge commons” and sinking together into a contentment without imagination.

Du Fu once wrote that a man “must read the contents of five cartloads of books” (男儿须读五车书). Real literacy, in other words, is born of wide reading. Without it, a person cannot describe themselves, construct the narrative of their life, or articulate it for others. What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts, and able to activate fresh existence whenever it meets those connections; thus, it continues to live in the latent spaces of the future. When youths encounter such writing, they gain the tools to craft their own narrative to express, create, and realize themselves. Humans achieve agency by composing their lives in their own language. Without a narrative viewpoint on one’s life, there can be no reconstruction of that life, no ethical experience.

Among OECD nations, Korea ranks first in suicide rates. Suicide is also the leading cause of death for teenagers here. I believe the core of this crisis is a lack of mental-health literacy on the part of students, parents, and schools alike. When young people do not possess that literacy, they cannot objectively recognize the state of their own minds, nor can they ask for help. Yet in South Korea, university admission is awarded strictly in order of multiple-choice test scores. Training to tick the right bubbles first dulls the power of thought and then produces illiteracy. Worse, many men in our country do not read books at all. Go to a literary reading: 99 percent of the audience will be young women. Look at the charts from online bookstores: most buyers are young women. Stadiums for baseball games, movie theaters, hip-hop concerts: again, women fill the seats. So where are the men of Korea? I have asked many people this question. The answers converge: they are sitting in front of monitors, working, playing, smashing things. And it is these scarcely literate men who have been governing us. Listen to their chosen words: always about smashing, punishing, exterminating. The result is that I now find myself, as a poet, trapped inside their screens, still trying to write.

I could start by adopting a nostalgic position: affirming that the writer is still someone who preserves their creative cuisine, using old-fashioned equipment to prepare dishes in which the mysterious ingredients derive directly from the author’s reading, travels, moments of wonder, and darkest hours. Once, we revered the act of writing as “divinely inspired,” the product of a rich inner life, the sense that writers enjoyed a privileged status that allowed them to whisper to the muses. In this sense, writing meant signing a pact with characters who themselves owed their existence to the author, the aim being to give a story resonance, to convey the feeling that the fate of humanity depended on the destiny of these protagonists, born from the upheavals of the writer’s experience in the world. Is this author now dead?

Our age is caught in a stupor of laziness, a frenzy of shortcuts, forgetting that a machine does not breathe, it does not sweat, it entertains no doubts. A machine can write poetry, effortlessly manufacture novels, essays, or stage plays on behalf of the writer, for whom all that remains is to put their name on the front cover. Artificial intelligence seems to allow the most gullible of us to think that anyone can become a writer, that they can rewrite One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, or So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ at the simple touch of a button.

Who is the real author of such a work? The writer who supplied the machine with raw material from his universe or the machine, with its algorithms, clichés, and ready-made phrases compiled by fabricated intelligence? I have been given manuscripts to read by young people dreaming of becoming writers who had neglected to tell me that their work was the product of AI. From the opening lines, I could see the redundant words, the obvious proliferation of adverbs, the absence of real and original situations. Superficially, their texts appeared to be well-written, but sadly one could tell that they had been formatted in the spirit of our age, repeating formulas better suited to airport novels or sentimental fiction. What was missing from these texts? A soul. Yes, it would be difficult to reproduce the soul of a text, because writing is not just a matter of telling a story: we writers cannot escape putting ourselves at risk in our style, our syntax, and with our awareness of riding on the shoulders of authors we have read, who have opened the doors of creation by drawing us into their world.

I was born in Congo-Brazzaville, a country where French is the official language. We inherited this language in the course of a history marked by conflict and resistance—but also capitulation to the French colonizer, who left our land in the 1960s, when African countries were gaining their independence. I am therefore primarily a francophone writer, and the question of my relationship with the French language must be considered in the context of this new era. To completely hand over this tool for communication to AI would be to disregard the fact that this language houses the history of colonized peoples, their miseries, their struggles to end slavery, and the acquisition by the African nations of their independence. I would be disregarding that it is from this turbulent history that an African consciousness emerged, a consciousness that is still in the process of defining its contours and geography, all piecing itself together through literatures that draw on local registers while embracing aspects of Western civilization, for better or for worse.

AI may well be able to take on board these cultural elements, but can it also reproduce the suffering of these oppressed peoples? This kind of cultural appropriation has occurred before, and our continent is still paying a heavy price for ongoing prejudices, which have resulted in a fixed and caricatural image of Africa in general. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, we saw a colonial literature that aspired to incarnate Africa. This literature was produced by Westerners for Westerners, to whom it presented a particular Africa that had nothing particularly African about it. Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness considered Africa from a distance, painting Africans through the prism of Western prejudice. Conrad could not capture the “African soul,” speak for it from the inside, or navigate the mythologies and cosmogony of Africa.

The African novelist has an unspoken pact with their people: to articulate their suffering, rewrite the history of the continent, and illustrate the joys and despair of its inhabitants. We are born with this feeling, and African novelists often have the sense that their work is a collective one, issuing from the people and returning to them. We carry this attitude within us, for we are conscious that our place in humanity is not secure, and we must fight for it every day. It is this endurance and this pact that AI is unable to recognize, at least for the present.

Of course, some might accuse me of harkening back to the past and asserting that the old is better than the new. (And they might add that there are “perfect” texts written with the help of AI and that what matters is to understand and popularize literature, etc.) Far be it from me to proclaim that the writer is dead and shout, “Long live the writer!” What I am doing is ringing an alarm bell, suggesting to the writer of today that they redefine themselves in order to protect their creation and resist the temptation to become the mouthpiece for a work that is substantially that of a machine. Solutions to our torments cannot be expected to come from a storehouse of platitudes thrown together by anyone capable of using AI, masquerading as a creator of what is, in fact, no more than a mishmash of what we have produced up till now and what we will produce tomorrow.

But since we do not have—or no longer have—any choice, we must come to terms with our times, and that entails necessarily separating the wheat from the chaff and, above all, resisting the temptations of fast-food literature served up in the motorway service stations of artificial intelligence. I remain convinced that the way out will be for the writer to offer originality drawn from their imagination and leave it to the reader to hunt down the sorcerer’s apprentices, since I am quite sure that they will be able to distinguish an authentic story from one born of technological programming. And only then, using all our vigilance and intellectual honesty, will we continue to value literary creation as the dwelling place of our soul, a soul we would not trade for anything in the world.

Countries across the Arab Islamic world have, even in their postindependence period, an enduring objection seemingly at odds with the new freedoms enjoyed by the previously oppressed citizenry. Namely, numerous literacy programs are met with opposition and resentment from certain quarters of traditionalist society. I’ve often felt that illiteracy in the Middle East and North Africa isn’t held in as high contempt as elsewhere; neither is it uniformly regarded as a moral blemish. Lawmakers and theologians point to the Prophet, whom Muslims aspire to emulate in word and deed, and his own supposed illiteracy. A commonplace of popular religious discourse vaunts the Prophet’s illiteracy as a sign of his sincerity, purity, and unblemished conscience.

Naturally, however, exploiting the legend of the Prophet’s illiteracy to justify ignorance itself springs from ignorance. Without access to a dictionary detailing Arabic etymology, many fail to grasp that the word for “illiteracy,” ummiyya, may mean something entirely different in the Qur’an, bearing no relation to its meaning in Arabic today. When God says that He “sent to the people of ummiyya a messenger from among themselves,” it is possible that He is referring to the tribes in the Arabian Peninsula who had “no divine Book.” And, similarly, the “ummi Prophet who believes in God and His words” could point to the fact that the Prophet is neither Jewish nor Christian.

Ambiguity and misunderstanding persisted in muddying interpretations, weaponized by authoritarian regimes to legitimize ignorance. This was the age of decolonization, and the intellectual vanguard—consisting of students and the intelligentsia—were instrumental in the successive uprisings and revolutions from the Atlantic to the Gulf, sending shock waves through these regimes. In countries like Morocco, education was corrupted and the noose was tightened on the intelligentsia to consolidate the regimes’ hold on power.

The sacred illiteracy became, then, the element par excellence shoring up the stability of these regimes, which were desperate for preservation. Ummiyya transformed into a hidden structure of despotism and supremacy. Thus was the fight against illiteracy dropped from the priorities of educational and developmental policy; programs contracted and were reduced to mere numerical indicators in development reports, voided of their deeper purpose of liberating Arab Islamic societies and fostering their peoples’ progress.

On several occasions, King Hassan II warned Moroccans of a “new illiteracy” that had escaped their notice. He stressed during a speech that “anyone who’s monolingual is illiterate.” This was no less than a form of evasion in the guise of a future-oriented posture, an alibi to divert attention away from the state’s failures to address the more fundamental structural problem of alphabetic illiteracy. Indeed, not only was this novel definition of illiteracy a celebration of the king’s bilingualism, it symptomatized Morocco’s postindependence era, which to this day valorizes mastery of the former colonizer’s language as an unspoken condition for official positions and governmental responsibilities.

The majority of the Arabized Moroccan population still suffers from linguistic injustice. The state continues to delay the establishment of an academy for the Arabic language, for which a law was passed more than two decades ago. The country’s second official language, Amazigh, fares no better than its sidelined counterpart despite the founding of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture in 2001. As a result, discussion of the “new illiteracy” in Morocco assumes that it is a byword for manipulation by the powers that be. Instead of confronting illiteracy head-on with clear-cut programs, the regime serves only its own interests.

This is exactly what will happen as Morocco transitions from alphabetic illiteracy to digital illiteracy. Digital culture has taken over the scene, and new technologies that do not necessitate a command of written language have burst into the Moroccan space. No longer is the ability to read and write a requisite for technology. Public policies claimed emphasizing digital growth at the expense of literacy programs was in the spirit of the times. So far, the state has won the bet, as this new illiteracy is manageable. As a society of illiteracy has become one of postliteracy, the need for traditional alphabetic learning has all but vanished, insofar as writing has been almost completely superseded by mediums of sound and image. Knowledge is compressed into short video clips overrunning platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The generation weaned on digital and audiovisual information feels little need for the analytical tools or critical comprehension of writing. Strangely, this new epistemological situation—a state of “anti-knowledge”—has not alarmed anyone. Market systems have espoused it, as it ensures an abundant supply of passive consumers able to conduct transactions without having to read a single written sentence. This captive audience, chronically online, is conveniently innocent of any distinction between substance and meaningless content. What they see is what they get. Lacking a cognitive, cultural, and critical core, these individuals’ technological mastery dazzles but proves ultimately to be a screen for their susceptibility to manipulation given their inability to scrutinize speeches and publications.

Morocco is no exception in the region. The Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization estimates that the number of illiterate people in the Arab World may reach one hundred million by 2030. While the Gulf states have had a relative degree of success in this regard thanks to their oil wealth, the technological tsunami has only entrenched the gap between affluent Gulf citizens and the countries’ poorer populaces. The Gulf’s hyperbolic investments in digital infrastructure, smart cities, and AI have not translated into any substantive progress in the realms of democracy, freedom of expression, and human rights.

Arab regimes, averse to the prospect of digital capitalism’s total monopoly, have established a postliterate empire of superficial content, allowing formal Arabic to erode beneath abbreviated colloquialisms and motley emojis. Their subjects are ill-equipped to mount an independent opinion critical of the prevailing order. We’re told that social media might be nothing but a means to an end; memories of the so-called Arab Spring are still fresh, when it restored the voice of the people and granted them a platform. But the new despots and censors have wasted no time in perverting virtual outlets for their own ends, poisoning their atmospheres with undemocratic consensus.

In my novel Hot Maroc, translated into English by Alexander Elinson, the real Marrakech isn’t markets and households but the “blue space” of Facebook, phone and computer screens, boutique news sites, cyber streets, and interactive time killers. My antihero, Rahal, begins by preferring the shadows but rapidly sheds his diffident, introverted personality and transforms into a monstrous figure the moment he sits before his computer screen. Hiding behind fake accounts and aliases, wreaking havoc on Facebook, an otherwise cowardly and undistinguished nobody turns into a digital political actor—not because he’s gained any real knowledge but because he’s learned to wield his anonymity to settle personal scores.

The new Morocco is a vicarious cesspit where rumors, libel, and fake news have become editorial lines. Tragically, this orientation is enjoying unparalleled popularity, while serious professional platforms face imminent collapse. As society glitches out, the octopus of manufactured opinion depends upon misguiding the public, fabricating virtual heroes and victims, and accomplishing the symbolic assassination of opposition figures. All this unfolds remotely via hordes of online trolls and via the slanderous press, which the regime shields from accountability. In Hot Maroc, Rahal is recruited by the intelligence services, only too happy to turn one more mentally ill keyboard warrior into a hired agent shilling the media machine. I wish I had merely imagined it.

Sudanese novelists of my generation were raised on books. Until recently, we couldn’t imagine any other pathway to knowledge. But while we hunched over paper and pored through books as though nothing else existed, a new technology of the imagination—of knowing, of learning, of connecting—was developing at the velocity of light, tools more suitable to this frantic age that made us relics of the last century, the forgotten children of ink and margins. Only some of us, however, truly inhabit a postliterate world. Beside us—often invisibly, almost always unheard—are the many who remain in the dark grip of illiteracy.

Truth to be told, we’re living in two parallel societies. Yes, younger generations—those with access to education, who have skipped ahead from schoolbooks to screens, from alphabets to apps—have found themselves detached from their social roots even as the communities they came from continue to crawl beneath the weight of illiteracy, held back by poverty, economic collapse, and one war after another. Sudan is, by nature or necessity, an oral culture. We lean toward speech more than writing. Illiteracy is widespread, and books are scarce. In a massive city like Khartoum, you’d be lucky to find ten proper bookstores—and by “proper,” I mean places that actually sell books worth reading. As for real, independent, cultural bookstores, you can count them on one hand. Outside the capital—places like el-Qadarif, Kassala, Shendi, el-Obeid, Dongola, el-Fasher—even one decent bookstore is the stuff of dreams.

Despite Sudan’s rich history—the home of the great civilizations of Nubia, Daju, and Alwa—books are a fairly recent phenomenon. Many writers like myself, from humble, rural backgrounds, got our first taste of storytelling from the riddles and tales our grandmothers and elders told us. Traditional healers and sorcerers write talismans on paper, naturally meant to be read by either evil or blessed spirits. I didn’t open my first book—a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror tales, translated into Arabic—until I was thirteen. The first bookstore, Sudan Bookshop, opened its doors only in 1902.

The long years of military dictatorship didn’t help matters. One after the other, each regime found its own way to suppress publishing and stifle writers. Under the Islamist government of the so-called Salvation regime (1989–2019), books were confiscated and writers harassed. In 2001, the Literary and Artistic Works Act was passed. The law determined what writers could write, where they could publish, and what would happen if they didn’t comply—sometimes interrogation, sometimes worse. Since 2005, more of my books have been banned than not. The Ministry of Culture eventually issued an official statement banning the circulation of one of my books altogether. But I found a way around it. I turned to the internet and started sharing my books freely, as PDFs, with anyone who wanted to read. It’s harder for the authorities to censor or block a download.

Besides the censors, the other enemy of literacy in our country is alphabetic illiteracy. According to estimates from UNESCO, as much as a quarter of the population of Sudan—nearly six million people—is illiterate. Literacy struggles under the weight of political authority’s neglect, making any meaningful support for formal education the bottom of government budget priorities. Herders and farmers prefer their children to stay home to help with daily survival activities rather than attend school. Others live a nomadic existence, making regular school attendance impossible.

And so we arrive at a generation divided against itself. One segment consumes modern technology, aided by their relatively comfortable material conditions, a reasonable level of literacy, and access to smart devices that connect them to the world. This segment of the generation lives in a virtual, interconnected world detached from their own social reality. The other group—deprived of modern means of communication by war, displacement, and poverty—cannot be expected to engage meaningfully with reading. Their access to literary or educational books is severely limited, confined mostly to uninspiring school curricula, deliberately designed—both ideologically and structurally—to perpetuate backwardness and dependence. Their world remains oral. Twenty years ago, when I was in my hometown of Khashm el-Girba, the volunteer organization I was working with arranged a visit to a very poor Christian family headed by an illiterate woman who sold local homemade liquor. She welcomed us warmly in her modest home. As I introduced myself, she cut me off and said, “Abdu Wad Maryam”—that’s my nickname in the village—“I know you. Every Friday, our priest comes to my house and reads your stories aloud in front of all the women in the neighborhood.”

I don’t think I’d hear a story like that nowadays. The woman’s children or grandchildren would rather scroll through their smart devices. There will always be passionate, talented people and a few wild, crazy souls drawn to language who wield vivid imaginations. As long as they exist, literature will endure. Maybe these creators will recite texts through apps built by clever engineers abroad. These apps will serve as bridges between literary works and those who still love literature, driven by some inherited spark. Lest we fade into oblivion, writers must face a postliterate world and confront an unavoidable future, rather than bury their heads in the sand.

But there is a greater threat facing both the postliterate and illiterate generations growing up in Sudan’s warring present—the weaponization of misinformation. False news spreads quickly across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and, especially, TikTok. Most of the time, it’s rushed information about battles that never happened posted by young people backed by militia groups. This only fuels the actual conflicts and wears down the people’s morale. One of the darker sides of illiteracy is that many fighters—whether from militias or regular armies—document their crimes against civilians or rival armed groups and broadcast them on social media. These videos could serve as evidence to hold them accountable (if there were effective local or international justice systems). But with the complicity of the international community, I fear these crimes will slip by quietly, like those before them.

Among the more disturbing aspects of this war is the phenomenon known in Sudan as al-Layfatiya, a term derived from the act of posting live videos. These are psychological warfare campaigns rooted in hate speech, racism, incitement to violence, and revenge, fought primarily on TikTok and other live-streaming platforms. Most of the Layfatiya, as the men and women involved are called, are poorly educated or disenfranchised. Many have probably never read a book and are unfamiliar with basic human rights. Even the sacred religious texts they claim to follow lie beyond their true comprehension. Yet they command millions of followers, engaging in fast-paced, deadly verbal battles. Their ammunition is lies, and their fallout is real: igniting conflict, increasing displacement, and worsening poverty. The next generation becomes soldiers, not readers, and the war drags further and further on.

A few years ago, after I deleted my Instagram account, I began a simple experiment. Every time I see my friends, I ask them what’s happened in their lives since we last met. The question usually catches them off guard; they assume that I already know, that “everyone knows.” They forget—or can’t quite grasp—that I chose to abandon the social network they use daily to answer that very question. When reminded, they pull out their smartphones to show me the photos I missed. But I insist: before showing me pictures or videos, they have to tell me what happened. I seldom succeed without becoming a nuisance. At most, I get fragmented accounts of disconnected moments they deem to be the peak of recent days. My question provokes despair at times, as if nobody has time for telling stories in a world where everything worth recounting has always already been “covered” by a fleeting digital record I failed to consume.

I’ve continued the experiment at my job teaching literature at a private university in Mexico. My course is part of the Latin American literature program, which is one of only a handful of majors on the subject offered in Mexico. Sadly, today the program is not very popular. At a university that this year admitted eighteen hundred first-semester students, some two hundred of whom enrolled in such majors as architecture, the Latin American literature major managed to attract only five to ten new students.

Ten years ago, I was a student at the program where I now teach. But the courses on offer today bear little resemblance to the ones I took as an undergraduate. In response to the steady decline in enrollment and prospective students’ demands for a more “practical,” career-oriented education, the major has shifted its focus away from literary scholarship and research and instead has increasingly embraced preprofessional training in editing, screenwriting, and creative writing. (Setting aside the fact that making a living writing or editing is all but impossible in today’s Mexico, where recent governments have hollowed out the country’s once-robust public funding for the arts, every novelist, showrunner, or managing editor worth their salt can attest that it’s impossible to succeed in any of those fields without first devoting one’s life to reading.)

Expanding the scope of the program is a laudable effort on the part of my university’s Literature Department; however, the nature of students’ demands is troubling. Although I’m only ten or twelve years older than my students, the distance between us feels greater than a mere generational difference. Why do young people with an ostensible interest in books no longer understand that the purpose of a literary education is to learn how to read with seriousness and rigor? Running all the risks associated with generalization, I can venture a quick answer: they were raised on the apps I’ve quit, software that has become such an integral part of their world that life cannot be imagined without it.

In the classroom, the experiment I perform on my friends follows a different protocol: before diving into the analysis of the assigned text, I ask my students to summarize what they read, relying only on their notes and memory. With each passing semester students seem increasingly less capable of articulating even the simplest answer to my question. Some can barely piece together a “story” in the sense that E. M. Forster describes in Aspects of the Novel: a simple sequence of events told chronologically (“The king died, and then the queen died”). After exerting heroic efforts, a handful manage to sketch out a “plot,” which in Forster’s scheme entails an additional layer of causality (“The king died, and then the queen died of grief”). The uncomfortable silence that follows my question at the start of each class doesn’t stem from the ineffability of the text or the situations it portrays but from students’ apparent lack of tools to renarrate what they’ve read, translate it into their own language, and build meaning beyond a string of hardheaded facts that might help them pass a high school exam but which belies an inability to understand, let alone enjoy, the linguistic complexity and thrilling ambiguity that distinguish Sor Juana’s sonnets from Rupi Kaur’s Instagram captions.

Among the recurring themes in my students’ comments about their reading experience are the usual complaints associated with the crisis of literacy one hears so much about these days. Many of these complaints stem from commonplace annoyances that we’ve all encountered as readers at one point or another—though that doesn’t make them an inescapable condition of reading itself. They recount their struggles to finish 250 pages in a single week and request that I, like other professors, consider cutting their reading load. They say it’s hard to concentrate, even when they silence their phones. They admit they can’t help abandoning a book at the first sign of boredom. It’s rare for them to read more than twenty minutes without getting distracted by checking the time, scrolling through social media, googling pictures of the author and the Wikipedia entry for the city where the story takes place, or looking up some aspect of the book that they feel compelled to verify as fact or fiction (my students are often afraid of “imagining it wrong”). Sometimes, when they are incapable of at least articulating why the readings are difficult, they seek odd solutions. One student mentioned looking for quieter places to see if that would help them “read faster.”

That last remark reminded me of the time, some years ago, when speed-reading courses for different educational levels became popular. These courses, offered by independent professionals as well as in schools or universities, were advertised in magazines, on billboards, and on the radio—in my view, an utterly naive fad. Getting better at reading has little to do with ocular agility or with cultivating the dubious skill of guessing the next word in a sentence like a large language model. Even at the most basic level, reading demands patience and the mental effort needed to induce the peculiar kind of shared synesthesia that allows us to turn blots of ink into sounds, mental images, and finally, one hopes, ideas and feelings.

It’s not surprising that courses that purported to teach how to read quickly soon disappeared from the market. The written content of social and news media became so fast that all reading became speed-reading: the written word as we’d known it since the time of Sumerian clay tablets was replaced by multimodal texts with visual, aural, and interactive components, making training in “linear” reading far less essential.

The speed-reading practices shaped by digital browsing have come to dominate the classroom. When my students are able to relay anything about what they’ve read, they tend to chop the plot into fragments, offering a short summary of each chapter with the flat affect of a Netflix synopsis. They focus on major events and overlook small but meaningful gestures; they tend to be sensitive to the characters’ motivations but struggle to understand that people are full of contradictions, insisting on the sort of single-minded congruence known only to pure-of-heart internet activists.

That my students struggle so much to read and narrate in the age of instant information, fake news, and big data doesn’t surprise me from an academic standpoint (I’ve read my Walter Benjamin). But if literature is “the best invention ever created by human beings to explore their own selves,” as Juan Gabriel Vásquez put it, I’m heartbroken to witness how difficult recounting their reading experiences has become for young people. This speaks to me not only of a crisis of literacy but of narrative: my students (and my friends) find it difficult to summarize what they have read or experienced because our era’s overabundance of information has so thoroughly stunted the imagination.

One cure for this ailment seems obvious enough: read more literature. The problem, in Mexico at least, is that the books offered by many of the country’s publishers won’t help much. Often, their catalogues amount to condescending attempts to flatter readers accustomed to consuming information at digital speeds with books tailored to the user. One example of this unfortunate trend is the recent decline of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, the state-owned publishing house. Founded ninety-one years ago to supply university students and academic researchers with quality editions of canonical texts at affordable prices—early offers included the first Spanish translation of Being and Time and one of the first unabridged editions of Capital in Spanish—the Fondo’s mission eventually expanded to enriching the national conversation by making high culture accessible to the general public. In recent years, however, the Fondo has been criticized for abandoning its mandate of enriching the lives of Mexican readers by providing them with challenging texts and instead publishing materials that seem to imagine an audience of nonreaders.

Nowhere is the Fondo’s abdication of its role more clearly visible than in the Vientos del Pueblo, a collection launched by the state publisher in 2019 that is allegedly meant to promote reading. The series comprises more than one hundred titles by writers ranging from canonical figures such as Tolstoy to contemporary authors such as Alejandro Zambra, as well as by figures of Mexican history such as Benito Juárez, all of them offered at remarkably low prices: they retail for less than one U.S. dollar each. This sounds great, except that calling Vientos del Pueblo a collection of “books” would be inaccurate—not just because its titles are fragile pamphlets held together with staples but because each of these booklets contains a haphazard selection of fragments taken from different works, presented without any kind of introduction or notes that could help young readers approach the texts, understand the context of their authors, or think critically about what they have read.

There’s no question that the state should offer the public a robust selection of quality reading materials at affordable prices, especially in places like Mexico, where the average price of a book in 2024 (around $14.40, according to the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry) was nearly equivalent to the minimum daily wage ($14.90). But to think that simply giving away books will turn people into readers, as a colleague once told me, amounts to believing that giving away roller skates will turn everyone into a skater. The idea that mass distribution guarantees access is naive. The decision to publish fragmentary pamphlets suggests, moreover, that the Fondo now operates under the assumption that working-class Mexicans who might not be able to afford books sold at market rates cannot be expected to read a whole novel. Instead of combating the crisis of literacy, initiatives such as Vientos del Pueblo amount to a surrender to the pernicious forces that have done such damage to Mexicans’ imaginative skills that even literature students have a hard time narrating what they’ve read—or, for that matter, their own lives.

As I read the Financial Times from July 4, futures crisscrossed. I don’t mean wheat or death futures, nor speculation on life-insurance gains or the next harvest in Ukraine. My thoughts about future developments diverged when I first read about the heat wave in Europe at the time and then about Meta competing with its biggest rivals to “secure computing capacity to power their AI models”; Oracle’s project to build new data centers, increasing capacity by one quarter of the current U.S. level, is one such endeavor. As energy needs are liable to soar, Meta has secured a nuclear power plant in Illinois for two entire decades. Meanwhile, operators of such facilities in France and Switzerland have been forced to suspend or reduce activity as temperatures have risen, the Financial Times reported. With rivers flowing low, it is impossible to cool reactors and spent fuel: heated water, discharged back into the rivers, would kill off plant and animal life. Compared with this, the EU’s AI Act seems a minor threat to GPT, Gemini, Llama, or Behemoth. One of many reasons for transatlantic strife and slander, the act went into effect in August 2024. Yet European AI start-up founders called it “a rushed ticking time bomb.” They want to compete, unrestricted by privacy, transparency, and copyright concerns.

I belong to a different camp, one that counts on states to regulate new technologies and act against ecological disaster. With like-minded translators, we formed the German-speaking cell of En Chair et en Os (“Of Flesh and Bone”), the French collective for human translation. (Its manifesto, accessible in English and seventeen other languages, has been signed by more than eighteen thousand writers and translators, among them Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux, Olga Tokarczuk, and J. M. G. Le Clézio.) In German-speaking countries, government subsidies for literary translation are substantial. The demand to limit such subsidies to humans, excluding publishers producing text with large language models, seems crucial to the future of the profession.

Recently, at a wedding party in Geneva, one collaborator with a Swiss AI start-up tried to convince me that we’re allies. He promised truly intelligent LLMs, powered by scientists, not by big business and late-adolescent testosterone. Such tools could greatly improve the understanding of historical texts, for example, using a large corpus of texts written in a specific period to propose translations. He inspired ideas about the productive use of AI tools for research, yet I remained skeptical about his vision of eliminating any individual bias in translation. Because I’m interested in personal voices in literature, he failed to lure me out of my ZAD—my zone à defendre, as the French call the sites occupied by squatters defending forests from concrete (I sometimes feel like I’m working out of one of those ramshackle ZAD huts myself). Our cell’s aim is to defend books written and translated by people. Most of us are defending our own livelihood, but we’d like to think this is about the human brain in a broader sense: about language, emotions, and minds; about people being capable of finding their own words for what they go through and dream of; about people actually talking to one another, learning other people’s languages. We worry about citizenry and democracies, because they depend on intelligent exchange between humans.

But I promised myself that this text would not be dystopic; there is no shortage of that in the news. Maybe the guest at the wedding party was right, and I should allow myself to envision new possibilities for my own craft. And there have been moments lately that made me feel hopeful. In July 2024, for example, on the slopes of Mount Banahaw, on the Philippine island of Luzon, a group of volunteers was building a mobile library. Outside of her usual tasks, a teacher dressed up as clown and carried a basket to the outer hamlets of their municipality, Rizal. For once, reading would not be a chore but fun. Being one of the few people translating literature from Tagalog to German, the local book lovers treated me as a kindred nerd. I was planning to write about their Book Nook for a German magazine. What surprised me most, in this country where 80 to 90 percent of the population has internet access (although slow and mostly on mobile phones), was that, after the two-year shutdown of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, the new exciting thing seemed to be real, live interactions and books written and printed in the country, as opposed to secondhand books in English donated by overseas relatives or visitors.

Some days ago, four women writers sat in a row in front of a ramshackle club under a flyover bridge in the city of Zurich. They made noise on mechanical typewriters. A small festival celebrated the anniversary of a local bookshop called Paranoia City. Guests were able to order a love letter, story, poem, or manifesto, and one of us writers would type it and sell it for a good price. The money went to the expanding bookshop. For some children, our typing was exotic. They crawled over us to look at the type slugs hitting the ink ribbon, leaving imprints on the paper. There was an excitement writing side by side with others while a band was playing; the texts seemed to emerge from the music, the children’s stares, and the rhythm of the typewriters.

These moments kindle a diffracted scenario of the postliterate world, which is not a unified one. As usual, technological innovation isn’t distributed equally. While some storm ahead, others are fed with fifth-rate versions, leftovers, and secondhand tools. And some are left out altogether. It must be wonderful to overcome the tedious aspects of writing—especially when writing in a foreign language, as I’m doing right now. What appears on the screen never matches the density, color, and melody of my thoughts. More fundamentally, the word thought doesn’t capture at all what occurs before typing. For a moment, I imagine us going from the brain-machine interfaces of the present to far more elaborate brain-machine-brain connectors that could give anyone an impression of my memories: the three-dimensional evocation of a Philippine mountain, for example. A school ground hit by a sudden downpour. Would the interface transport smells? That coagulation of cold steam, rot, and flowery brume? The pounding of the rain? A staccato of words from the Financial Times now grounds the memories, interspersed with the face and the voice of a student of creative writing at the University of the Philippines talking about “dry boxes.” Since the house he lives in is inundated several times a year, he has replaced his bookshelves with boxes of hard, waterproof plastic that can be sealed. That way, his books are safe in the new typhoon season, the new normal of a changing climate.

But in the best of postliterate worlds, we wouldn’t just drown one another in raw memories and real-life brain jumble. We would learn to work the flow of images and sounds, get high on the intensity of impressions while moving through one another’s inner worlds. Perennial archives of music and visual art would help to structure what we “think” for, and toward, others. And when every act of communication becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk, legions of artists are needed as teachers. And someone to protect us from trolls, hostile image invasions, theft of banking details, and political fakes.

Even so, energy supplies most likely won’t have multiplied, and people will still be required to work in material reality, cutting hair and cleaning kitchens. Maybe that will be us. Our salaries are too low for us to get the Wagnerian Interface implanted—all we get is the basic version allowing for the transmission of limited commands and some ready-made streams for “joy,” “sadness,” or “sex on the kitchen table.” Yet someone will surely turn the motivational soundtrack provided by employers into truly exciting beats, stirring dysfunctional emotion; they will work on glitches, turn signals into Morse code. If we’re not too high on ourselves, we might have time to learn some simple tools for messaging. Old code turned into a secret language. “Talking about a revolution . . . sounds like a whisper.”

It’s likely that there will be regions completely left out of the new grid of connectors. Today, the Book Nooks supported by the National Book Development Board in remote areas of the Philippines are the only access points to literature for families without internet. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 33 percent of the global population was still not connected in 2023. Twice within six months I’ve read or heard about the possibility of areas devastated by natural disaster being abandoned by governments as the maintenance of modern infrastructure might be too costly. After the Swiss village of Blatten was buried by a collapsing glacier in May, a major newspaper in Zurich asked the question: Must we give up on vulnerable alpine villages? Such doubts were more implicit after cyclone Chido hit the island of Mayotte, a French département in the Indian Ocean, in December 2024. In both cases, doubts were shrugged off quickly and millions of government funds were promised for reconstruction. But how long will that continue to be possible and in which countries?

If regions regularly devastated by disaster are abandoned and safer nation-states are unwilling to take in refugees, more and more people will be left to fend for themselves. And we might find ourselves in a scenario reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy: at the fringes of a galactic empire, true knowledge survives. A secret tradition. Except that the descendants of booklovers on the outer Philippine islands, where typhoons hit land, don’t need to be secretive about their reading and writing skills. In a world created and connected by splendid connectors and Wagnerian Interfaces, they will be forgotten anyway. Making the best out of limited information, they might be the only ones who know what to do when energy supplies run out in overheated Europe, North America, and China. (Their little library might include notes left by former overseas contract workers in Riyadh, Seoul, and Hong Kong—descriptions of different writing systems, norms of electric circuits, recipes for cruise ships’ kitchens, and letters to spouses. And some precolonial epics of the Philippines were turned into graphic novels in the twenty-first century.)

But—not connected by any device—I think of a Filipina friend’s objection that this all sounds like a government pep talk on “resilience,” the object of funny memes, when what critics are really asking for is tangible action. She belongs to the camp that wants states to act against disaster. Maybe I went amiss, wanting to tell myself a happy ending after reading the Financial Times and getting carried away by a doomsday tale. This genre might be part of the problem, as it takes the collapse of today’s state structures for granted. Keeping up the vision of En Chair et en Os entails the hope that the tides will turn and reasonable state policies on literacy, enlightened education, and ecology will gain force. For moments of despair, I keep the smaller but sturdy hope that some people will always want to continue training their brains enough to find pleasure in reading. They might resemble grandmothers of Confucian persuasion practicing calligraphy or graffiti artists perfecting their craft long after midnight. Cultivating inalienable skills—those anchored in the body—can’t be useless, no matter whatever’s next.

When asked why I’m not using LLMs for translation, the most honest answer is that they don’t appeal to me. Being lucky enough to work in a cultural environment subsidized by local and federal government, I can allow myself to meander into etymologies and melodies, enjoying translation as artistic and philological practice. It is good work. Coming up with a voice in German for a text written in a completely different language requires a leap into uncertainty. Why should I want to leave the most exciting part—writing the first draft—to a machine?